Ever since the news broke that your diet soda may be making you fat, pop-addicts have been anguishing over how to get their fizzy fix. (For Mad William it’s all about a caffeine delivery system.)
The good news? There may be a solution, but you won’t find it in the beverage aisle. Marketed by Virgil’s and Zevia, there are diet drinks containing stevia, an herb in the sunflower family. When concentrated, stevia (which is also known as sweetleaf) is 300 times sweeter than sugar, although it can have a licorice-like aftertaste in high concentrations. It has a negative effect on glucose levels, meaning that it can actually enhance glucose tolerance – a fact that’s made it popular among diabetics.
The FDA, however, has refused to approve it as a food additive and requires it be labeled as a “dietary supplement”, a fact that many big-name manufacturers including Coca-Cola are now trying to change. Its been used widely throughout Japan for over 30 years, and to date there are no conclusive reports linking it with health complications. In fact, a 2006 World Health Organization (WHO) study found that it has no carcinogenic effects whatsoever.
So why isn’t it approved for use here in the U.S. where our “war on obesity” would ordinarily prompt us to look at such alternatives? The answer, unfortunately, appears to be purely political. Keep in mind what I said earlier about the fast-tracking of aspartame at the request of Donald Rumsfeld, who was then the COO of the company which discovered and marketed Equal.
Now, note this:
In 1991, at the request of an anonymous complaint, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) labeled stevia as an “unsafe food additive” and restricted its import. The FDA’s stated reason was “toxicological information on stevia is inadequate to demonstrate its safety.”[33] This ruling was controversial, as stevia proponents pointed out that this designation violated the FDA’s own guidelines under which any natural substance used prior to 1958 with no reported adverse effects should be generally recognized as safe (GRAS)….
The FDA requires proof of safety before recognizing a food additive as safe. A similar burden of proof is required for the FDA to ban a substance or label it unsafe. Nevertheless, stevia remained banned until after the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act forced the FDA in 1995 to revise its stance to permit stevia to be used as a dietary supplement, although not as a food additive — a position that stevia proponents regard as contradictory because it simultaneously labels stevia as safe and unsafe, depending on how it is sold.[35]
While all that wrangling is going on, stevia continues to be more closely regulated by the FDA than most medical supplies. However, since it’s been categorized as a “dietary supplement” you can still buy it… you just have to go to the health food section of your grocery store. (I’ve been buying it for years.) Now, you can also buy stevia-sweetened pop, which means that Mad William can now get his caffeine fix again.
Chubby Mommy 
Chubby Mommy